Although
usually qualified by the adjectives “western” and “European,” Royal Armouries MS. I.33 (typically referred to as “one-thirty-three”)
is the oldest extant work on personal combat. It is here presented
as a combined facsimile, editioprincepsand
English translation. No small effort! The resulting book can
be used by scholars equipped to engage the language and
artistic conventions of the original manuscript and by historical martial
artists who will put theoretical reconstructions to the test of a trained
body.

Based on paleography and artistic style I.33 (a.k.a., the Tower Fechtbuchand, occasionally, the Walpurgis Fechtbuch) was
produced in Germany c.1295. It is written in Latin with German
words (Schiltslach, Halpschilt, Langort) used for some specific techniques. The
manuscript consists of 32 leaves with illustrated upper
and lower registers both recto and verso presenting a system of attack
and counter based on seven guards (custodia). In
marked contrast to later works which demonstrate a variety
of weapons and may include mounted combat, I.33 shows only the one-handed
sword and buckler, weapons not usually associated with the ordomilitaris. This
raises the questions of who produced the manuscript and
who is the intended audience. The teaching role is taken by a tonsured
priest (sacerdos, clerus)
who instructs a student (scolaris, discipulus). In
the last four illuminations, the role of the student
is taken by a woman named Walpurgis.

A related
question is the purpose of I.33. One interpretation is that I.33
is “ludic”
rather than “earnest,” i.e., that the system here recorded
is intended for sport rather than for combat since it
lacks the graphic killing blows that are a feature of similar later works
(p. 10). One
illustration (p. 38) shows the student’s sword directly under the
priest’s jaw in the upper register while the lower register shows
the counter move that will prevent this outcome in the exchange. It
doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to add blood or death
to this and any number of similar illustrations. There are references
in the text to actions that have lethal potential but
are not illustrated: “…receives
a thrust in the belly or is stabbed with the sword (p. 45).” This
page is especially interesting since the author blames
the artist for leaving out the rest of the sequence. I.33 may be considered
similar to the oriental forms (kata) that deliberately do not show the effective
moves of the sequence. Practitioners of the art can fill in the blanks
while the ignorant remain ignorant. Clearly I.33 was never intended
to be a beginners’ manual despite the contention that the seven guards
are those assumed by anyone holding a sword, even someone ignorant of the
art of combat (p. 1). The idea that fencing, or at least good fencing,
is somehow natural--a definition that changes over time--obviously
appeared very early in the western tradition. This single reference
to the philosophy of combat cannot, however, put I.33 into the category
of a martial arts treatise. The remaining category is aide-memoire, a prompt
book for someone who already knows the show rather well.

There
will inevitably be questions of translation. Is custodia best
translated as
“guard,” a term known to every modern fencer, or as “ward” a
deliberate archaism that has the advantage of not conveying
a modern concept? The
frequently used verb ligo and its compounds (subligo, religo)
present a problem, at least for those trained in classical
or modern fencing. The
usual translation,
“bind,” is a modern technical term. The 13th-century ligacio is
not a modern bind (as the translator is well aware),
and practitioners will eventually decide whether to stick
with “bind”
while acknowledging that the action has changed along
with the weapons or to choose an alternate term. Dance historians,
for example, decided early on to stick with the original
terminology even though the same terms are used in modern
ballet to describe rather different movements. The
translator has changed passive voice to active when this
seemed better suited to the action described (p. 38). Given that
the Latin text and the illustrations are right at hand
this should not present much of a problem. New
translations will inevitably appear as historical fencers
work through this material.

The
function of any edition is to make a text available to scholars. By
that measure, a quick scan of the titles of papers given at the Kalamazoo
Medieval Congress in the last few years shows that the
edition is doing its job nicely. Papers
have discussed such points as a correct reading of the
illustrations (e.g.,
the buckler is occasionally shown edge-on with the boss changed
into a prominent point, but the sword is always shown flat; it is extremely
unlikely that the system recorded in I.33 never used an oblique cut), the
function of the Walpurgis figure (not an allegorical figure, an Amazon,
or St. Walpurgis) and the influence of I.33 on later Fechtbücher (considerable). I.33
presents so many challenges that one martial arts historian
hypothesized that “the author was an indifferent and ineffectual
swordsman.” [1] With a good edition of the
manuscript now available to scholars this seems untenable,
and alternative solutions are being put forward. The experience of
military historians in interpreting medieval depictions
of battle and combat scenes could well make a contribution here, and the
study of Fechtbücher as a genre could help with the interpretation
of those “earnest” illustrations.

The
production quality of the edition may help persuade acquisitions
librarians who might not be enthusiastic about medieval swordplay. The hardcover
stitched binding means that the book will not come apart
even if lifted by a single page or with a sweaty gauntlet. It is
printed on glossy stock with full-color high-resolution reproductions. Mutilations,
interpolations and bleed-through along with what remains
of the original text and illustrations are there to compare
to the editor’s
work. Also
included are the handwritten commentaries of earlier
scholars that are bound with the manuscript On the other hand, the
unpublished opinion of the Austrian scholar AlphonsLhotsky was not bound with the manuscript and is not reproduced
or quoted here. Lhotsky worked extensively with the Episcopal registers
of Würzburg and identified at least one of the three distinguishable
scribal hands of I.33 as belonging to one of the bishop’s secretaries. The
editor’s decision to use the page numbers penciled in by a modern
hand rather than the folio recto and verso designations simplifies
use of the book but has the potential for confusion between
folios and page numbers. Since
the penciled page numbers are not visible in the facsimile
the question of cropping or photo editing arises.

The
realities of production costs make it expensive to publish full-color facsimiles
of longer works, but high-quality black-and-white reproduction can give
a lot of detail. Cost-cutting expedients that result in editions
in which some of the original text is unreadable make those books less
useful to scholars. In at least one such publication the sequence
of the folios was rearranged without making clear the changes that were
made, a procedure that can potentially mislead both scholars and historical reconstructors. Any
engagement with I.33 makes it abundantly clear that words
and pictures are part of a cohesive whole--both are necessary; and neither
is sufficient–and
any interpretation of the combination needs to be cross-checked in practice. The
availability of a reliable edition makes this possible
and is an important step in the rediscovery of the western martial arts
tradition. The
$54.95 price tag is moderate by current standards.